Not it's not a Syrian folksinger. This is a painting of an apple that I picked next door in the Damascus Town Forest. Damascus PA not Syria, It is of unknown variety. This area of northeastern Pennsylvania was covered in orchards at one time. Some time over the last 50 years or so most orchards were abandoned for one reason or another. Some years there are so many 'wild apples' that you can pick to your heart's content and have apples of many varieties for months. This year not so much.
Anyway I painted this as a challenge to myself to paint with Geneva Paints all by themselves. Geneva paint are a slow drying very fluid paint developed bu Mark Carder. Several years ago i did testing for them during their development in conjunction with my regular paints. I never really got the chance to build a palette from the limited color set of Ultramarine Blue, Roso Corsa (red) and Cadmium Yellow. So I mixed a spectrum palette; Red, Red Orange, Orange, Yellow Orange, Yellow, Yellow Green, Green, Blue Green, Blue, Blue Violet, Violet and Red Violet. Very nice color. All from the original 3. Color is amazing.
Recently I have been learning how to build a working palette from the spectrum. Mostly from Judith Reeve* one of my life painting group. A working palette of semi neutralized color. More true to the real world of color. And faster to mix to match real world color use. This painting took about as long as most of my 6 x 6 Kitchen Art pieces. Somewhere around 2 hours. The Geneva Paints were a challenges though the colors mixed beautifully. Fast and predictable. The color blocking was very quick. The finish was difficult. The body of the paint is somewhere between liquid and very heavy cream. It stands up but doesn't have every cohesion to bring a mongoose hair brush to a point. So toward the end I swapped out Geneva White for my white. Much better.
All in all a successful attempt. I'm sure theres a way for me to boost the body in Geneva Paint.
On to the next one
* Judith Has a fascinating web site full of magnificent paintings and incredibly brilliant study of color and composition. https://attentiveequations.com
Damascus Red 6 x6 oil on panel 2017